Tag: Jobs Report

U.S. industry added 242,000 jobs in February—but the major gains were in low-wage industries, and average hourly earnings dropped 3 cents. And unemployment rates remained far higher for minorities than for whites.

Yes, all of the U.S. jobs lost to the Great Recession were recovered by mid-2014. But “we didn’t manage to create enough new jobs to satisfy the shortfall” in positions that would have been made “had the economy kept chugging along at a reasonably normal pace,” writes Suzanne McGee at The Guardian.

Transportation and warehouse companies have added jobs, factory employees exceeded 12 million people for the first time in four years, the elderly are seeking work, pay remains stagnant at the bottom, and the long-term unemployed are still screwed.

The 179,000 jobs created in May and boasted about by the Obama administration are no more than “the usual lowly paid non-exportable domestic service jobs—the jobs of a third world country,” former Assistant Treasury Secretary Paul Craig Roberts writes.

Truthdig Editor-in-Chief Robert Scheer and the other “Left, Right & Center” panelists ask, in the context of the new jobs report, whether the U.S. has two economies. Also, Florida GOP Sen. Marco Rubio wants immigration reform and President Obama does also, so what will it take to get it passed?

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of all this is that we’re in the fifth year of a supposed economic recovery from the second-worst economic downturn of the past century, and we’re still not nearly back on track. Instead, we’ve had the most anemic recovery in history.

Truthdig Editor-in-Chief Robert Scheer and the other “Left, Right & Center” panelists ask whether the new jobs being added match the ones that are lost. Should we mourn a permanent decline in the middle class? Accept it and train for it? Should we cheer the recent economic growth, or fear another crash?

Friday’s jobs report demonstrates an economy that’s still moving in the right direction but way too slowly, which is why Washington’s continuing obsession with the federal budget deficit is insane. Jobs and growth must come first.

The New York Times columnist takes on the conspiracy theorists—former General Electric Chairman Jack Welch (pictured) among them—who cried foul after the jobs report released Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that the unemployment rate dropped below 8 percent for the first time in nearly four years.

We’re still crawling out of the deep crater we fell into in 2008 and 2009. The percent of the working-age population now working or actively looking for work is higher than it was, but still near a 30-year low. But at least we’re crawling out.

A look at the day’s political happenings, including Mitt Romney apologizing to nearly half of America, Justice Scalia weighing in on abortion and gay rights, and the horrendous thing Rick Santorum wants to do to Big Bird.

The New York Times columnist takes aim at Republicans for blocking legislation from President Obama that might have helped with the jobs recovery and then blaming his policies after the latest round of disappointing employment figures.

May’s pathetic jobs report put markets in a tizzy; Obama appeared both tough and moral in a behind-the-scenes New York Times look at his counterterrorism approach; NYC Mayor Bloomberg proposed a ban on large-size sodas.